track of what is real and what is not. "This
:film integrates my life's achievements," he
told me. "It's the most complicated stuff
anyone's ever done." Another time, he
said, "If you set your goals ridiculously
high and it's a failure, you will fail above
1 ' "
everyone e se s success.
George Lucas popularized space
opera; Steven Spielberg has perfected
awe. Cameron's movies, soaked in sweat
and blood and scorched by apocalyptic
flames, have romance at their molten
cores. Some of his most memorable char-
acters-Sarah Connor, the heroine of the
"Terminator" movies; Ellen Ripley, of
"Aliens" -are mothers. The writing is a
genre of its own: "tech-noir," Cameron
called it after "Terminator"; his late-period
style is more like gear- head schmaltz.
"IN THE BLACKNESS we hear the lonely
ping of a bottom sonar," the beginning of
his treatment for "Titanic" reads. "Then
two faint lights appear, close together . . .
growing brighter. They each resolve
into clusters of lights, which are soon re-
vealed to be two DEEP SUBMERSIBLES,
falling toward us. We are somewhere in
the ocean deep, looking up at two subs
freefalling like express elevators. . . . Soon
they are fireflies, then stars. Then gone."
Spielberg says, "He gets a lot of points for
being a techno-brat, but he is a very emo-
tional storyteller."
"With 'Avatar,' I thought, Forget all
these chick flicks and do a classic guys'
adventure movie, something in the Edgar
Rice Burroughs mold, like John Carter of
Mars-a soldier goes to Mars," Cameron
told me. The hero of "Avatar," Jake Sully
(Sam Worthington), is a paraplegic ex-
marine who travels to Pandora, a moon
in the Alpha Centauri star system, where
there is a human colony. Humans can't
breathe the air on Pandora; Jake lies in a
casket-like vessel, while his conscious-
ness, projected into an "avatar"-Vishnu-
blue and nine feet tall, like the native
population, the N àvi-explores Pando-
ràs rich interior. It is a fantasy about fan-
tasy, about the experience of sitting inert
in the dark while your mind enters an-
other world. Set roughly a hundred and
twenty-five years in the future, "Avatar"
is, like most speculative science fiction, a
cautionary tale. Humans have turned
Earth into a wasteland and, in their pur-
suit of a precious superconductor called
Unobtanium, are beginning to do the
same to Pandora. Jake, through his ava-
tar, falls in love with aN àvi princess, who
teaches him to live in harmony with na-
ture, and then he leads her people in an
insurrection against the colonists. "Of
course, the whole movie ends up being
about women, how guys relate to their
lovers, mothers-there's a large female
presence," Cameron said. "I try to do my
testosterone movie and it's a chick flick.
That's how it is for me." This summer,
addressing an auditorium filled with
thousands of teen-age boys at Comic-
Con, in San Diego-an annual conven-
tion of science-fiction, action-adventure,
and fantasy fans-he made his identi-
fication with the fair sex complete. When
someone in the audience asked about his
next movie, he replied, "You know, it's
not a great time to ask a woman if she
wants to have other kids when she's
. "
crownIng.
C ameron behaves as if he were the
embattled protagonist of one of his
own films-an ordinary Joe beaten on
the anvil of extraordinary trials. "The
words 'No' and 'That's impossible' and
phrases like 'That can't be done'-that's
the stuff that gives him an erection," the
actor Bill Paxton, who has worked with
Cameron since the early eighties, says.
Cameron reserves a special quotient of
his anger for suits who get in his way.
"Tell your friend he's getting fucked in
the ass, and ifhe would stop squirming it
wouldn't hurt so much" was the message
he once told a Fox producer to deliver to
"We can't all workfor Goldman Sachs."
an executive at the studio. He sees him-
self as essentially outside and other and
alone; he bites the hand that feeds. "Even
though he knew I was on his side, no-
body's ever on his side," Bill Mechanic,
who ran Fox Studios during the making
of "Titanic," said. "It's like you're in the
trenches and your infantry-mate is shoot-
ing at you, even if you're the only one
there who can save his life."
There is a chivalric aspect to Camer-
on's antagonism; he figures his struggles
in heroic terms. "I try to live with honor,
even if it costs me millions of dollars and
_1- 1 . " h " I '
taKes a ong tIme, e says. t s very un-
usual in Hollywood. Few people are
trustworthy-a handshake means noth-
ing to them. They feel they're required to
keep an agreement with you only if you're
successful, or they need you. I've tried not
to get sucked into the Hollywood hierar-
chy system. Personally, I don't like it
when people are deferential to me be-
cause I'm an established filmmaker. It's a
blue-collar sensibility."
Cameron was born in Canada, and
grew up in a small town not far from Ni-
agara Falls. (He revoked his application
for American citizenship after Bush won
the election in 2004.) His father was an
engineer for a paper company; his mother
brought up five children, and told stories
of racing stock cars and joining the wom-
en's auxiliary of the Canadian Army. Jim
was the oldest, the ringleader of his sib-
lings and the other kids in the neighbor-
hood. "There was always some new thing
that absolutely needed to get done,
whether it was building a fort or an air-
plane or launching rockets," he told me.
"We made it in the papers once, for a
U.F.O. sighting over a hot-air balloon
that we built and launched at night that
was powered by candles." His hero was
Jacques Cousteau, and although he lived
four hundred miles from the ocean, he
became obsessed with scuba. He learned
to dive in Buffalo one February in a
Y.M.C.A. pool.
At fourteen, Cameron saw the movie
that made him want to make his own:
Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odys-
sey," the first cinematically exquisite
treatment of what had traditionally been
B-movie material. "I sawall these cool
spacecraft and I wanted to know how the
visual effects were done," he said. "I
started building my own models of space-
ships, from the '2001' model kit and the